^{4}\textrm{He}\) When a radioactive atom emits an alpha particle the mass number decreases by four and the atomic number drops by two. Here is the equation for the alpha decay of radon-219 into ...

Such a parent process could be a previous decay, or a nuclear reaction. For a summary table showing the number of stable and radioactive nuclides in each category, see radionuclide. There are 28 ...

Example nuclear reactions include radioactive decay, fission, the break-up of a nucleus, and fusion, the merging of nuclei. In systematic studies of radioactive isotopes, the so-called islands of ...

Radioactive decay is a spontaneous and random process. A block of radioactive material will contain many trillions of nuclei and not all nuclei are likely to decay at the same time so it is ...

The search for new elements comes from the dream of finding a variant that is sufficiently stable to be long-lived and not prone to immediate decay. There is a theory in nuclear physics about an ...

Deep in the sagebrush steppe of southeast Idaho on December 20, 1951, a team of nuclear physicists gathered around four ...

There are two main classes of fundamental nuclear data, concerned with nuclear structure and decay, and with nuclear reactions. The Nuclear Data Section is responsible for providing accurate and ...